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Balloon Boy

AP - A homemade balloon aircraft floated away from a yard in Colorado after a 6-year-old boy was seen climbing in, setting off a frantic scramble by the military and law enforcement before the balloon slowly touched without the boy inside.

I happened to turn on the TV when the news came across that a balloon was drifting in the Colorado sky carrying a little boy in the basket. Instantly, I recalled the opening scene in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love that I had first read as a short story in the New Yorker, followed by the novel, and later viewed as a film with Daniel Craig and Samantha Morton. Who could ever forget that opening scene?

The beginning is simple to mark. We see in sunlight under a turkey oak, partly protected from a strong, gusty wind. I was kneeling on the grass with a corkscrew in my hand, and Clarissa was passing me the bottle—a 1987 Daumas Gassac. This was the moment, this was the pinprick on the time map: I was stretching out my hand, and as the cool neck and the black foil touched my palm, we heard a man’s shout. We turned to look across the field and saw the danger. Next thing, I was running toward it…There was the shout again, and a child’s cry, enfeebled by the wind that roared in the tall trees long the hedgerows. I ran faster. And there, suddenly from different points around the field, four other men were converging the scene, running like me….What were we running toward a I don’t think any of us would ever know fully. But superficially the answer was a balloon….We were running toward a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes. At the base of the balloon was a basket in which there was a boy, and by the basket, clinging to a rope, was a man in need of help….

I wonder how many others had the same association? No one in the media yet, as far as I can tell or in any of the literary blogs I read. Do you recall the story? The opening incident, its outcome, the effect on the lover’s (Joe and Claire) relationship, and the subsequent ominous encounters with a man (Jed) who was also there in the field, pulling hard at the ropes to bring the balloon down. The novel and the film are as enduring as the opening scene and they have remained with me throughout the several years that have passed since I first read the excerpt in the New Yorker, then the novel, followed by viewing its film version a few years later.

In the afternoon I turned on the TV once again. At that very moment the “Breaking News” came across the screen that that the 6-year-old boy was found hiding in a cardboard box in his family's garage attic Thursday after being feared aboard a homemade helium balloon that hurtled 50 miles through the sky on live television. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wolf Blitzer quite so happy.

Now in the morning there are concerns being expressed about the public costs of the saga (the Denver airport was closed while the balloon was cruising in the gusty winds across the Colorado sky and a large search party was formed to scour the area for the boy). And apparently the boy’s father had uttered something to the effect that “we did this for a show” so investigators will try to determine if the whole thing was a hoax, beginning by questioning the family that apparently has a history of public display (the boy’s mother and father had appeared on “Wife Swap”).

Still there is no word yet from Ian McEwan or discussion of the striking similarity to his work of fiction, or to the way in which there is often little distinction between fiction and reality. However, a few Tweeters have noticed the resemblance. “I wonder if Balloon Boy and his parents have read Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love? “Great book centered in a similar tragedy.” “Balloon Boy reminds me of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love.”

Thought and Action

I don’t know why I did it. But today I can recognize that events back then were part of a lifelong pattern in which thinking and doing have either come together or failed to come together—I think I reach a conclusion, I turn the conclusion into a decision, and then I discover that acting on the decision is something else entirely, and that doing so may proceed from the decision, but then again it may not. Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do.….I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions. From The Reader by Bernard Schlink

The British Psychological Society’s Research Blog asked some of the world’s “leading” psychologists to identity the “one nagging thing they still don’t understand about themselves.” Is there only one? Anyway some of the answers were rather interesting.

Ellen Langer said she still didn’t understand why she has nightmares almost every night. Richard Wiseman said he did understand why he sometimes said or thought witty or funny “things.” Chris McManus gave the answer I liked best. “What is this thing I call beauty?”

However, David Buss gave one I’ve thought a lot about at various times.

“One nagging thing that I still don’t understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated. Another is succumbing to the male sexual overperception bias, misperceiving a woman’s friendliness as sexual interest. A third is undue optimism about how quickly I can complete work projects, despite many years of experience in underestimating the time actually required. One would think that explicit knowledge of these well-documented psychological biases and years of experience with them would allow a person to cognitively override the biases. But they don’t.”

Is it possible to overcome these psychological biases? You’d think so, especially once you become aware of them. But no, this doesn’t happen very often. I think this stems from a failure to recognize the sharp distinction between thoughts and actions.

Knowing something is one thing; acting upon it is another. Everyone who smokes knows the dangers of doing so. But that doesn’t stop them from lighting up every now and then.

It isn’t uncommon for individuals undergoing psychotherapy to know a great deal about the origins of their problems and various approaches in dealing with them. In spite of this knowledge, they find it impossible to do anything to overcome their maladies.

And Jonah Lehrer on his blog The Frontal Cortex writes about the limits of self-knowledge.

My own unfixable flaw concerns "paralysis by analysis," or thinking about decisions that I know shouldn't be consciously deliberated. Although I've written about Tim Wilson's work with strawberry jam, and know a bit about the information processing powers of the unconscious, I still find myself spending far too much time in the supermarket, debating the merits of various jams. It turns out that writing a book about decision-making doesn't make you a master decider - it simply allows you to have more precise names for your mistakes.

A few years ago I did an experiment on the effects of knowledge in changing behavior. I asked would knowledge of the Bystander Effect (The frequent failure of individuals to come to the aid of a distressed person) lead individuals to avoid this failure in the future?

In one condition, I gave the participants a great deal of information about the Bystander Effect, showed them a brief film about it, and asked them to write a short essay on the topic. In spite of this knowledge, these individuals were no more likely to come to the aid of a person who dropped a large box of books or was observed having a severe asthma attack than those in the control condition who were not given any information.

A lifetime of studying psychology has convinced me, that all too often we overestimate the influence of what we know on behavior. Instead, knowledge represents only one of the many factors that influence us, especially in situations where there are strong social pressures. In these situations, we may find it very difficult to translate our knowledge into action. Until we develop more effective ways to accomplish this, we must be careful not to overestimate the extent to which a psychologically informed public will behave any differently than an uninformed one.

A Happy Marriage

I have been trying to read A Happy Marriage: A Novel by Rafael Yglesias. Naturally, I was attracted by its title. A happy marriage? What is that like I wondered? Did you ever know anyone who said they had a happy marriage, at least one, that lasted more than a dozen years? I’ve read about a few, but never in a novel.

And then the rave reviews started coming in. Susan Issacs wrote in the Times Book Review, “A tour de force, touching and harrowing at the same time.” The book flap claimed the book is “both intimate and expansive…” Another Times review said it was, a "profound deliberation on the nature of love, marriage, and the process of dying." How could I resist?

And so I started reading. The story begins with Enrique’s effort to meet his wife-to-be, Margaret. It is agonizingly slow. A friend of Enrique’s is doing all he can to prevent their meeting. And yet when they finally do, Enrique stumbles over one hurdle after another. He is indecisive, anxious, clumsy, rather adolescent actually.

They finally meet and Enrique is smitten at once. He is taken with, “Margaret’s wet blue eyes, thin body, dainty movements, the way she flings her leg over a chair: Something happened inside Enrique like a guitar string suddenly unstrung. There was a shock and a vibration in his heart, a palpable break inside the cavity of his chest.” And so it goes.

The succeeding chapters alternative between their equally slow courtship and those where Yglesias describes Margaret’s awful battle with cancer “in pitiless minutiae.” Dinitia Smith writes in the Times, “Seldom has there been in any novel such an unremitting depiction of the ravages of cancer.” It is grim and very difficult to read.

I put the novel down, placed it at the bottom of my stack of books, and mumbled something along the lines of “I can’t read this any more, the reviews not withstanding.” I wondered if something was wrong with me. How come I found so little in this novel that so many are raving about?

And then I read a review by David Meyers at The Commonplace Blog that made me feel I hadn’t gone off the deep end after all. Meyers writes: “Few books have disappointed me more than Rafael Yglesias’s novel A Happy Marriage. Its title raised my expectations to probably unreachable heights…It is touted by Scribner as an “achingly honest story about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together—and what makes a happy marriage.” But it is none of that. It aches not; neither is it honest. And it is not about what makes a happy marriage.”

Although I have not finished the novel and am not sure if I will, I did early on find an important lesson for couples with few interests in common. Yglesias writes, “They had different tastes, and sometimes wanted different things from each other, and yet they had lived a happy life together…” Clearly there is far more to a close and long lasting marriage than shared interests.

When I read that passage in A Happy Marriage, I was reminded at once of how bewildered Woody Allen was that he and Mia Farrow remained together for as long as they did even though they had little in common.

“I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early -- 5:30, 6 -- and I love to eat out, late. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants; I like fancy places. She can't sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. …. She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places. … She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day."

One wonders to what extent A Happy Marriage is a novel. Every commentator points out how closely it mirrors the facts of Yglesias life—that he dropped out of high school to write a very successful first novel, had an affair with another woman, and gave everything he had to his wife while she was battling cancer. Myers remarks that the novel deals less with Margaret than with Yglesias himself. He concludes, “Margaret Joskow must have been an extraordinary woman, but from this novel the best you can do is to suppose so.”

Le Big Mac

There were several accounts on the Web last week about New York City’s new law on posting calorie counts in restaurant chains. A study tracked food choices at four fast-food chains—McDonalds, Wendy’s Burger King and Kentucky Friend Chicken—where customers were informed or the calorie content of food items.

The outcome of the study should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the long line of previous field studies of the effects on information on modifying behavior. Research as far back as the energy crisis of the 70s and 80s demonstrated over and over again that posting requests to save energy or informing people of their actual consumption with and without cost feedback did not turn them into energy conservers. Still we continue to rely on information techniques in trying to regulate or change behavior

Evidence from the recent study in New York found that about half the customers noticed the posted calories associated with particular items of food. About a quarter (28%) of those who noticed claimed the information had influenced what they ordered while almost 90% said it had led them to make less caloric choices

But when the investigators analyzed the receipts (during a four week test period), they found that slightly more calories were ordered than the subjects in the control condition that measured customer choices (during a two week baseline period) before the law went into effect—a common control condition in field studies.

The research was carried out in what were said to be “poor neighborhoods” where there are high rates of obesity. “One advocate of calorie posting suggested that low-income people were more interested in price than in calories.” I laughed when I read this knowing full well that while those more financially endowed are probably less concerned about price, they are just as likely as anyone else to ignore the information and let their taste buds or food preferences govern their choices.

Since information approaches are not costly and can be easily implemented, the more central issue is how to make them more effective. Simply posting information or passing out a leaflet doesn’t guarantee by any means that it will be translated into action. Several suggestions have been made on how to overcome this limitation.

• Vivid and highly concrete information should be employed. Instead of posting caloric values, show a symbol of a clogged artery.

• Take account of the motivation of the target population. If you are working in an area where price is important, offer an incentive, say a free burger for every nine ordered, as many coffee shops do for coffee purchases.

• Emphasize the trustworthiness of the message. Pair the information with respectable physician, hospital of government agency rather than McDonald’s or Burger King

• Make the information as personal as possible. Instead of posting the caloric information, arrange to have the manager hand out a colorful card with the same information to each patron with a few words of encouragement.

• Tailor the message to the target population of clients. Again, is price is crucial to the group, make sure to emphasize the incentives for choosing “healthy” items that will lead less costly future purchases, to say nothing future medical expenses.

Noon. Hunger the only thing
singing in my belly.
I walk through the blossoming cherry trees
on the library mall,
past the young couples coupling,
by the crazy fanatic
screaming doom and salvation
at a sensation-hungry crowd,
to the Lake Street McDonald's.
It is crowded, the lines long and sluggish.
I wait in the greasy air.
All around me people are eating—
the sizzle of conversation,
the salty odor of sweat,
the warm flesh pressing out of
hip huggers and halter tops...

The rest of the poem appears at http://poemhunter.blogspot.com/2007/05/you-cant-write-poem-about-mcdonalds.html

Weekend Reading

Don't Miss This Meal

Guerilla Bookstore Shelving

Always a Writer

Cool Bookclub

Get a Little Crazy

The Other Prize

Fictional Friends

In Arlington Park, Rachel Cusk wrote about one of her women characters, “Never, never did she feel in life the sense of recognition, the companionship, the great warm fact of solidarity that she found between the covers of a book.”
In a strange way I have also come to know and befriend some of the people in the books I read. They are usually individuals who confront the same problems I do, have the same aspirations and cultural views that I have or would like to have if I was more sophisticated or better read. They are doing things I have done or dream about doing and they are doing them with greater depth and knowledge than I could ever hope to in my lifetime.

Moreover, I probably know some of my fictional friends better than my real ones. In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom wrote that one of the reasons we read is “Because you can know, intimately only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing.”

Do the fictional friendships we have bespeak of some kind of malady? Other perfectly normal readers seem to have the same kind of relationships. In So Many Books, So Little Time, Sara Nelson writes: “I talk about my books as if they were people, and I choose them the way I choose my friends; because somebody nice introduced us, because I like their looks, because the best of them turn out to be smart and funny and both surprising and inevitable at the same time.”

And Proust is said to have compared friendship to reading, because both activities involve communion with others. He also noted that reading had a key advantage: “In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.”

In her introduction to Alice Munro’s short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain Sarah, Sarah Polley commented that “…I have had a relationship with this story that has been a powerful and as transformative as any I have had with another human being.”

Polley’s expression is surely one most powerful and moving statements I have read about the effects of reading literature. She notes that “The Bear Came Over the Mountain entered my life when I was twenty-one years old. It crept right into me, had its way with me, and shifted my direction in ways I didn’t understand until years later.”

She was inspired by Munro’s story to adapt and direct a film version, Away From Her. Julie Christie stars as a woman suffering the early stages of Alzheimer’s that progresses further and further into darkness. Her husband of 44 years struggles not to lose her while she, in turn, drifts away. Polley says the story reshaped her idea of love and led her to a place that “I am very, very grateful to be.”

October

Today is National Poetry Day in England. We are informed that Britain is a poetry nation. Among other events, readers of the Guardian are asked to select their favorite poem.

I pondered this for a bit and then I recalled a beautiful poem my wife had calligraphed in orange ink and framed with an equally appropriate orange border that has been hanging on our wall for years.

I had always thought it was a poem from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel as indicated at the bottom of the print. It certainly reads like one. But the citation is incorrect, as I have learned today. And it isn’t a poem. Instead, it is a combination of closely related passages from his Of Time and a River.

Nevertheless, I will post it here as it appears on the print. It does capture this time of the year, doesn’t it? And I will always regard as one of my favorite, yes poems.

October has come again—has come
again. The ripe, the golden month
has come again and in Virginia the
chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps
the middle music of the seasons and all things
living on earth turn home again. The bee bores
to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old
and fat and blue, he buzzes loud crawls slow,
creeps heavily to death, the sun goes down in blood
and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of
old October. Come to us, Father, while the winds
howl in the darkness, for October has come again,
bring with it huge prophecies of death and life
and the great cargo of the men who will return.

Click of Recognition

I continue to be intrigued by the reasons individuals are drawn to literature, why literature seems to mean so much to dedicated readers. Of course, the question emerges from my own experience of feeling literary fiction plumbed human behavior more deeply than the research I was doing or teaching in psychology. I thought fiction captured those experiences of ordinary life that simply couldn’t be measured by psychological tools.

I am sure one of the reasons why individuals are so powerfully affected by literature is the feeling of “personal resonance” that occurs when reading a work of fiction. The sense of resonance occurs when a reader is reminded of an experience (s) from their past.
This is the theory of Uffe Seilman and Steen Larsen derived from their research on “remindings,” as they put it or some association between the text and an event in their life.

The link can occur because the reader was either a participant or an observer of a similar experience. Another way to express this is in terms of verisimilitude. This suggests that some readers are not necessarily concerned with the story’s truth or writing excellence or even the richness of its narrative, but rather with the degree to which it resembles some experience they have had. For these readers, if the story doesn’t ring true to anything they have encountered before, it isn’t likely they will enjoy it.

This view is similar to one expressed by the philosopher Susan K. Langer who suggested that: “The poets business is to create the appearance of experience, the semblance of events lived and felt, and to organize them so they constitute a purely and completely experienced reality, a piece of virtual life.”

A literary reminding, if you will, is never the same for readers of the same text. This is because the experience of each individual is never the same as any other. The recognitions that we find in literature, then, are unique for each reader. In addition, as Seilmann and Larsen acknowledge “…different readers--even with similar background and similar present circumstances—may react very differently to a give work…”

We also test a literary truth against our own experience. So in a way reading literary fiction is not that much different than doing science. Science tests its propositions against generalized (aggregate) human experience. Literature tests its truths against each individual reader’s experience.

Again, Susan K. Langer put it well: “The criterion of good art is its power to command one’s contemplation and reveal a feeling that one recognizes as real with the same click of recognition with which an artist knows that a form is true.”

It is the click of recognition, the remindings and the sense of personal resonance that drew me to literature. And I’m sure it is the same for many other readers too. As one of the participants in Changing Life Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program put it: “I started to see myself in him [ship captain in Jack London's Sea Wolf] and I didn't like what I saw."

(The Seilman and Larsen study (including their experimental test) Personal Resonance to Literature: A Study of Remindings while Reading appears in Poetics, 1989, Volume 18, pp 165-177.)

Literary Critics

In his blog on October 2nd, Patrick Kurp quotes the writer Dawn Powell,

“The new writers disdain human curiosity; they wish only to explore and describe their own psyches; they are too egotistical and snobbish to interest themselves in neighbors. The urge to write now is no longer the love of story-telling or even the love of applause for a neat turn or dramatic twist. It is the urge to show off, the author as hero is a big sex success and leaves them gasping. The book’s drive is only the desire to strip the writer’s remembered woes and wrongs and show his superiority to the reader – not to communicate with him or to entertain.”

And then Kurp comments:

“Her words are a prophecy fulfilled. How often do we learn something from a contemporary novel or poem? When does fiction or poetry extend our knowledge of the world? When is a work of literature more than another act of solipsism?”

At the very least, I find both comments unkind generalizations. I mention them here because they reflect the views of several other literary critics that I read. They also imply a certain ridicule or contempt of the appreciation of arts by individuals with less background or knowledge of literary history and contemporary standards of judgment than they have

Contrary to Kurp’s view, I continue to learn a great deal from reading literature. I also do not share his views on the solipsistic nature of literary works—here I presume he means most modern novels. Similarly, I take issue with Powell’s views on the lack of human curiosity of “new writers.” Who is she talking about or who is Kurp talking about when they bemoan the quality of contemporary fiction or poetry?

I did not find Pascal Mercier’s novel Night Train to Lisbon, perhaps the most stimulating novel I’ve read in a while, lacking in curiosity. Quite the opposite, in fact. The questions posed throughout the novel, the characters and situations described are scarcely the work of a writer who “distains curiosity.” In my view, the works of Ian McEwan and Alice Munro, to name just two, fall into the same category. So do the novels of Michael Ondaatje or the short stories of William Trevor.

Are we not all entitled to our particular literary and artistic pleasures? Are there standards of literary excellence that meet with uniform approval, standards against which we can use to judge the value of the works we read? Some critics extend lavish praise on Proust, others find him impossible to read. I believe the same is true for almost every writer or poet most often mentioned among the finest.

Recently Michelle Obama delivered a lecture on the arts to an international audience at the Pittsburgh Creative Arts and Performance School. Her words on the importance of the arts speak eloquently of an appreciation of the richness of artistic expression and give pause to anyone who thinks it is no longer a source of knowledge or story telling pleasure. Here are a few excerpts from her remarks:

“We believe strongly that the arts aren't somehow an 'extra’ part of our national life, but instead we feel that the arts are at the heart of our national life. It is through our music, our literature, our art, drama and dance that we tell the story of our past and we express our hopes for the future. Our artists challenge our assumptions in ways that many cannot and do not. They expand our understandings, and push us to view our world in new and very unexpected ways…..

"It's through this constant exchange -- this process of taking and giving, this process of borrowing and creating -- that we learn from each other and we inspire each other. It is a form of diplomacy in which we can all take part….

"We want to show these young people that they have a place in our world, in our museums, our theaters, our concert halls.... We want them to experience the richness of our nation's cultural heritage, one on one, up close and personal, not on TV. We want to show them that they can have a future in the arts community -- whether it's a hobby, or a profession, or simply as an appreciative observer….

"In the end, those efforts, and the performances we're enjoying today, and the work these artists do every day here in America and around the world -- all of that reminds us of a simple truth: that both individually and collectively, we all have a stake in the arts, every single one of us.

"And you don't need to be rich or powerful to lift your voice in song or get out of your seat and shake your groove thing. [Laughter.] You don't need to be a Van Gogh to paint a picture, or a Maya Angelou to write a poem. You don't need a Grammy or an Oscar or an Emmy to make your work on the cultural life of your community or your country a valuable one.

"That is the power of the arts -- to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common; to help us understand our history and imagine our future; to give us hope in the moments of struggle; and to bring us together when nothing else will.”

Weekend Links: Books & Reading

Half-Read Books

Espresso Book Machine

What to Read?

Hybrid Books

Most Influential Book

Active Reading

The Wisdom of Children

Like literature, films give me a place to locate myself. They bring to mind new ideas to tinker with, call into question others, and remind me of where I belong. Sometimes they console me and help me to get through my dormancy for a few hours. I am amazed at their power and the way they enter my life.

Sometimes I live with the characters on the screen for days and find it hard to get them out of my mind. There are moments when I imagine taking on their appearance and others when I begin emulate their behavior.

It took me more than a week to recover from the somber tone of In America in spite of the irrepressible joy and sparkle of its two little girls. Their indomitable spirit could not overcome the specter of death that hovered over their life. At the end Christy, an eleven year old, as beautiful and as perceptive a person as I have ever seen on film, asks you to try to forget, to try to forget the death of her brother, even though she knows that neither she nor you will ever be able to.

Christy narrates the story of her family’s emigration to America from Ireland. She tells it quietly and realistically. Her reticence is beguiling. We know she sees well beyond appearances; we know that mostly by her silences. Her quiet knowing manner as she tells her story is the only reason I went to see the film again. I wish there were more people like Christy. I wish I knew them too. One would be enough.

Now that I am a member of the discount demographic, I go to the cinema more than I care to admit. I feel somewhat like Susan Sontag who “At the end of her life, working hard, and often ill…went to the movies every day of the week.”

Earlier this week I saw the Italian film Quiet Chaos. The film begins with the tragic and unexplained death of Pietro’s wife at their seaside summer villa. Pietro, an executive at a global media company, spends his days brooding on a bench at a small park just outside his 10 year old daughter’s school. He reads the paper, becomes familiar with the regulars, meets business colleagues, lunches at the local restaurant, and silently flirts with the beautiful woman who walks her dog each day. The days of mourning stretch into weeks.

Meanwhile his daughter Claudia, who seems immune from any sense of emotional loss, is at school across the way. One day her teacher introduces the class to the concept of a palindrome. The notion of reversibility captures Claudia’s interest.

As Christmas approaches, Pietro asks her what she wants for a gift. She ponders his question for a few days. Does she finally express her grief by asking for the return of her mother? Nothing at all like that. She wants her father to resume his life and return to work.

At times, I am startled by the wisdom and sensitivity of young children. Where do they learn to be so perceptive? How can we learn when to listen to them more closely? The scenes and individuals depicted In America and Quiet Chaos have stayed with me for days. I think often about the themes they explored and the way their characters confront the reality of life.

I am reminded that no less so than literature, the tales depicted in the cinema confirm the old Jewish proverb: “What is truer than the truth? A story.”

Kindle Smindle

I do not have a Kindle and remain uncertain if I will ever read a Kindle edition of a book. If I saw it or any other e-book as an improvement of reading experience, I would most assuredly. But I await such evidence before taking the plunge.

For evidence, I must rely upon the reports of friends who have the device or writers who have evaluated their own experience reading an e-book. Nicholson Baker, reports in The New Yorker, that his attempt to read books on the Kindle2 was thoroughly underwhelming. “I squeezed no new joy from these great books though.”

He downloaded several classic and contemporary novels and read of little of each one, but not more. The gray screen (“a greenish, sickly gray”) annoyed him and he says some readers claim the Kindle2 is harder to read than the Kindle1. It unsettled him that a Kindle book “dies with its’ possessor.” There’s no book to put on his shelf, even though it is surely overflowing with more than enough already. Baker reports that illustrations, tables and photographs are difficult to read on the Kindle’s relatively small gray screen.

The preservation of a book strikes me as extremely important matter. Jean-Francois Blanchette from the Department of Information Studies at U.C.L.A. takes up this issue in a letter to The New Yorker:

“Nicholson Baker’s excellent piece on the Kindle foregrounds a thorny issue in the shift from print to digital media—that of preservation). … Even more significant, what the preserved items will look like is unclear, as data formats, computing platforms, and reading devices ceaselessly morph into their next market-driven incarnations. Imagine if the only copy left of “Imaging in Oncology” were the Kindle version, with its garbled tables and lost color coding? Or, a more likely scenario, if several copies of the book existed in different formats, each with a different visual presentation? In each case, the authority and usefulness of the cultural and scientific record would be severely impaired.”

I read The New Yorker each week and the Times each day. Both can be read with a Kindle, as well. But the Kindle versions are not exact reproductions of the print editions. In the case of The New Yorker, I understand there are no advertisements, some of the cartoons are missing, and not every article is reproduced. Baker reports that much the same is true for the Times:

“The Kindle Times…lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and call-outs and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsabless, its Web-site links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports, scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms.”

For Baker, the Kindle version of the Times is by no means a savior of the newspaper. Quite to the contrary, it kills the joy of reading it.

When I buy a book on Amazon, I often check to see if a Kindle version is available. More than half the time it isn’t. Baker’s experience is the same for books (at least 25) that he purchased recently for which there is no Kindle version. It all depends on what you like to read. If romance novels are your cup of tea, the Kindle will satisfy all your needs. If you prefer lofty works on abstruse philosophical and scientific issues, you are unlikely to find them at the Kindle store.

Finally, Baker managed to force himself to read a complete book (The Lincoln Lawyer) on the Kindle2. Clearly it was a struggle and done “out of a sense of duty.” He notes “It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.”

Although he has a long history of reading printed books, my sense is that Baker tried to read a Kindle book with an open mind. But in his view it was by no means an improvement on a printed version and my hunch is that is also the case for other long time readers of his generation. Whether or not it will be true for younger individuals, who have grown up peering at small screens all day remains to be seen.

Write a Letter Today

At a party one night in New York, the then-young heroine and wife-to-be in Rafael Yglesias’ A Happy Marriage exclaims to her suitor:

“Don’t call! Write me a letter. That’s what’s wrong with men and women today. There’s no letter writing. We need to get back to the way it was in Jane Austen’s day.”

I think a great many people bemoan or “complain about the lost art of letter writing now that we’re all busy texting and tweeting and Facebooking and whatever” as Jenna Krajeski writes at The Book Bench.

What is lost is the opportunity for the letter writer to compose a reasoned expression of an idea, an experience, to speculate and describe in more than a word or two a series of events or beliefs. There is also the loss to the recipient who has the pleasure of reading the account, giving it some thought, and then replying in turn.

The historian also loses the record of the exchange, one that makes it possible for others, regardless of their purpose, to learn about the exchange and the relationship between the correspondents.

Krajeski points us in the direction of a Web site, Letters of Note that “…is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails.” (I am not quite sure how Shaun Usher, the letter collector, manages to obtain copies of emails, unless those who write them are in the practice of saving their gems.) Letters of Note has links to its most read letters and a set of categories that include art, cinema, law, politics, religion, technology, etc.

Krajeski writes optimistically, “Maybe it will renew young folk’s interest in the dying art.” I wouldn’t bet on it--that is for sure. It is hard enough to read a full page of electronic text, let alone compose one of equal length, electronic or otherwise.

Of course, you could also go in search of Jen Hofer, who recently set-up a letter writing stand in New York’s Union Square. Just head over her way, tell her what you’d like to say and to whom, and bingo for $3.00 she will write, address, and stamp the letter for you. Perhaps it won’t be long before she or someone else creates a Web site where the letter-writing-challenged can do the same.

This will no doubt lead to a letter writing Renaissance that will please historians and letter writing collectors and that may turn out, after all, to confirm Karjeski’s prediction that the letter writing traditions of yesteryear will make a comeback.

Half & Half

In commenting on the photo of sliced up copy of A Suitable Boy, at Book Bench Thessaly La Force writes:

A colleague of mine once tried to read Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy.” Finding it too heavy for travel, she tore the book apart. Some might say, “sacrilege,” but I say, “practical.”

Why would you ever have to tear a book apart? Put it in your backpack if you can’t fit it in your suitcase. Or take it with you in your carry-on travel bag.

I can't imagine ever wanting or needing to tear a book apart. If you had a hardback copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and no room in your suitcase or backpack for it, would you slice it down the middle? Why the middle? You’d probably need to slice that tome into tenths.

If you had a 1,000 year old beautifully translated version of War and Peace that you had no room in your suitcase or backpack for, would you slice it down the middle?

I used to know someone who would tear the pages out of a book once she had finished a page. She did that to avoid marking her place in the book with a bookmark. What a booklover she was!

Of course, I only saw her do that when she was reading cheap paperback novels. Since I never saw her reading David Foster Wallace or Leo Tolstoy, I doubt if she ever had need for anything as humdrum as a bookmark.

Books are treasures the most treasured of all treasures. They are sacred. From one who values books and devotes much of their life to them now, I can’t imagine cutting one into separate portions, paperback or hardback, practical or not.

The heaviness of books is often given as a reason to favor the Kindle and others electronic readers like it. An electronic version of Infinite Jest would fit right into your coat pocket or purse. But the Kindle is not a book, although it might be argued it provides the same message as a book does.

But the reading experience is altogether different. And for those of us raised before the digital age, reading always meant more than the message. It also involved the mode of delivery and the situation in which it was delivered--the typeface, the cover, the paper, the size of the book, the binding, etc.

The Soul of Venice

Video of the Week as a preview of Ackroyd's Venice: Pure City

Literary Blogging II

David Myers at A Commonplace Blog begins his summing up of the literary blogging interviews (links to the last seven are posted below) by noting:

After nearly two weeks of reflection on book blogging by some of the best bloggers out there, what have we learned? That book blogging expands the range of book discussion. That it is a form of literary criticism, however implicitly. That it is more conversational but also more ephemeral than formal criticism. That it may be cynical, but is always rooted in a love for books. That it is still in its infancy. That the audience for it is small. That it is unpaid.

After reading the symposiasts who participated in The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, I am encouraged by the wit, knowledge, and book sense on exhibition in a few well-tended parks of the literary blogscape. But I am also discouraged about the future of book blogging. I no longer believe, as I once did, that book blogs might revive a free-wheeling and raucous literary culture. The source of my discouragement is our symposiasts’ conception of blogging. Terry Teachout puts it best: blogging is “introspection made public.

I began blogging a little over a year ago. I am sure there were several reasons although who can ever be sure of one’s motives or their recollections of why they did something? I know I found increasing pleasure in reading and wanted to talk about it with someone or, at least, give expression to my thoughts. I thought blogging about what I was reading might be one way to start. It might also help me to clarify the ideas I was reading about and why I did or didn’t like the material. Everyone seemed to be doing it. I thought why not give it a try.

My initial plan was simply to post some of the notable passages from the books and periodicals I had read over the years. The passages were to be drawn from my Commonplace Book where they were kept throughout this time. I recall my first post was a sample of the forty-five passages I had saved from Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

My model was the “Commonplace Section” from each issue of the American Scholar. They consist of extracts from various authors who have written about a particular topic, listed on two pages of this publication without commentary or analysis. For example, recent topics have included Loafing, Change, Failure, Marriage, and in the most recent issue the timely theme of Debt.

It hasn’t really turned out that way at all. Instead, I have found so much to write about in the books I’ve been reading lately and the abundant material on the Web, that I’ve not really had a chance to post very many passages from my Commonplace Book.

My hope is to begin doing that selectively. I’ve read so many fine books over the years and saved page after page of passages from them, that there’s a great deal to discuss, although it does require a pretty good memory of the story and characters. I think the best approach would be to take some of the best passages and respond to them in the form of annotations. I will try to do that more frequently during the next year of blogging.

The Neglected Books Page

On The Seawall

Nota Bene Books

I’ve Been Reading Lately

House of Mirth

Anecdotal Evidence

A Commonplace Blog

Mysteries of Silence

From the front flap of Sonata for Miriam by Linda Olsson, a beautifully written book that moved me deeply:

On a midsummer day in Auckland, New Zealand, two events occur that will change composer Adam Ankar’s life forever. As a result, Adam embarks on a journey to uncover his family’s past that takes him from New Zealand to Krakow, Poland, where he learns of his parents’ fate during World War II, and finally to Sweden. There he meets the mother of his child for the first time in over twenty years and must face the impossible choice she once forced him to make.

In Sonata for Miriam a musician searches for his roots, his real family, and the woman he fell in love with long ago. There is much that is never said in this novel as silence and unspoken words become its central theme. The following quotation appears on the first page:

But words must be found, for besides words there is almost nothing. Szymon Laks

Adam Ankar never knew who his father was for most of his life. He says, Silence was imposed on me from the very beginning, and I lived with it until it because my own. There were no answers, so there was no place for questions. Adam’s mother was silent about his family, where they came from, and who his father was, and Adam found it impossible to ask her about him.

They had fled from Poland to Sweden during the war where he eventually fell in love with another musician, Cecilia. After she becomes pregnant, she asks him to choose between her and their child. We never learn exactly why and neither of them ever speaks about it. The choice confronting Adam is excruciating, but in the end he chooses to raise their daughter, Miriam, and together they move to a remote island in New Zealand.

He repeats the pattern of silence that his mother set by never speaking to Miriam about her past. When she dies in a tragic accident, he returns to Poland to unravel the mystery of his past and then to Sweden to meet Cecilia after their long separation. But even then, he finds it difficult to talk with her.

But words were never my medium. It was silence that I had been taught. I was an expert on silence. And then, when I needed words more than ever in my life, they completely eluded me.

Ceclia lives alone, also on a remote island, where she and Adam finally meet. Still after nearly two decades of silence, she also finds it difficult to seek the information that you would expect here to crave. She says, I think I became an artist because in my art I was able to express what I could never say.

Together they …sat is silence, holding our glasses, watching the fire.

Cecilia says, Let’s not talk. Not Yet. … if we could keep it at bay, we could draw out this moment that seemed to sit between the past and the present, perilously balancing between memory and hope.

Literary Blogging Part I

In a recent series of interviews organized by Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence
and David Myers of A Commonplace Blog fourteen literary bloggers were asked a series of questions about blogging. While you might want to put different questions to the bloggers, here are the nine that Kurp and Myers posed:

1. What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

2. Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

3. How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

4. How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.

5. How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

6. What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

7. Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

8. In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

9. Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

The links to the first seven responses follow:

Elberry’s Ghost

American Fiction Notes

Laudator Temporis Acti

Turmsegler

Books, Inq.—The Epilogue

The Little Professor

About Last Night

In Transit

Marks in the Margin will be on another break as I am in transit now from Honolulu to Portland, Oregon where I had previously lived for 40 years.

Living for a year on a tropical island in the middle of the ocean has been an extraordinary experience.

Hemingway once wrote a six word short story: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

I need a few more words: I often ask myself how can I ever leave this place. There is only one reason. And so we leave.

Paris

I had hoped to go to Paris this summer. I had planned to take the train from London after visiting a friend in England. I thought of it more or less as my swan song. Long before Florence took hold of me, Paris was the place I always loved most. But a few days before I was to leave, I caught a very bad cold and did not want to become seriously ill so far from home. So I cancelled the trip and instead read Hemingway memoir of his early writing days in Paris, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition.

It was good to read the book again and frankly I can’t tell how or where it’s been restored nor am I interested in the reasons it was done. Hemingway takes you right into the mood of being in Paris, a Paris that I’m sure still exists and is what I had hoped to discover in my own time there.

He goes to the cafes a great deal--some to write, some to talk, and some to hide, and some to eat or drink. Everyone had their private cafes there where they never invited anyone and would go to work, or to read or to receive their mail. I can’t imagine writing much of anything in that terribly interesting and therefore distracting setting. But I can imagine talking. But with whom? I don’t know anyone in Paris. Does it matter?

He writes about the craft of writing and how he did it and how to do it better. I am sure that is one of the reasons I read it the first time and very definitely the most recently too.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

Work could cure almost anything. I believed then, and I believe it now.

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

…mot juste—the one and only correct word to use

How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.

…Paris, the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is….

…how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.


And then he writes about what it felt like to be in Paris. These passages are among the most beautiful in the book.


The trees were beautiful without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains were blowing in the bright light.

Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold wintry light.

Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.


And Hemingway writes about the people he knew in Paris, the people who became his friends. He writes a great deal about Scott Fitzgerald and somewhat less about Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach. He had many friends and many others who he didn’t care for at all.

The only things that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

Everybody has something wrong with them.

The last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again.

For the girl to deceive her friend was a terrible thing but it was my fault and blindness that this did not repel me. Having become involved in it and being in love I accepted all the blame for it myself and lived with the remorse.


And so I didn’t go to Paris this summer and I am not sure if there will ever be another chance. Instead, I will have to depend on Ernest Hemingway to take me there and back. There are advantages of that—no jet lag, no budget-busting expenses, no effort at all. Just a book and a comfortable chair.

Bookless Libraries

A friend sent me word of yet another library that is replacing its books with computer work stations. In this case it is the library at Cushing Academy, a New England prep school. The school is spending millions to build a digital learning center filled with computer stations, laptop friendly study carrels, and large flat screen TVs that will project data from the Internet. The headmaster reports he sees books as an “outmoded technology.”

Still more and more books are being printed each year. However, the number of library books in circulation is not growing in tandem as most librarians report that their circulation figures are holding steady or decreasing. In contrast, digital use has increased significantly with a dramatic increase in “hits” to library electronic databases.

Another result of the digital revolution is the allocation of library funds with a major shift away from books to electronic resources. In 1998 the library at the University of Texas in Austin spent roughly 5% percent of its annual materials budget on electronic resources and 30% on monographs. In only three years, those allocations were reversed so that in 2001 20% was spent on electronic materials and only 15% on monographs. Virtually every library in this country reports comparable trends.

New library designs, as well as renovations of older ones, call for storing books in buildings apart from the library computer centers. A major renovation at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities library eliminated the libraries book stacks and moved them to the basement or elsewhere on the campus to provide space for computer labs and a digital media center.

What will be gained and lost by the digital transformation of libraries? When I used to study in the library, every once in a while I’d take a little “study break” to wander up and down the aisles, checking the titles of the books that caught my eye. This kind of exploration will no longer be possible in the new bookless library. There will no discovery of that unknown book that you subsequently found indispensable. Thomas Benton has recently described the importance of such moments in the process of doing research.

I remember one time I was writing about Edgar Allan Poe and phrenology when I found a box of ephemera—not catalogued in any detail—that included a pamphlet for a book by an early psychologist who analyzed Poe on the basis of daguerreotypes of the poet. I quickly found the book in another area of the same library, and discovered a sequence of pages that purported to show that Poe was suffering from a disorder that affected only one hemisphere of his brain and that revealed itself in the asymmetry of his face…that accidental discovery—the centerpiece of a subsequent article—would never have been made but for the serendipity and convenience of the stacks.

How often I recall a similar experience in my own research in the library. I would go in search of a particular bound volume of a journal. Accidentally I’d pick out the wrong volume and beginning scanning the pages, only to discover another article, perhaps even more important than the one I was searching for and that, in turn, led me on a path of further inquiry that would never had occurred if I was searching for the article online. Who has not had the pleasure of discovering such an article by thumbing through the journals of their discipline?

A few months ago I went back to the library to try to locate the date of an article in The New Yorker that I had copied many years ago. Fortunately, the bound volumes of the magazine that has been published week after week since 1925 were still on the shelves in the stacks. I thought for more than a moment about the remarkable treasures contained within those pages--Capote, Cheever, Flanner, Nabokov, O’Hara, Thurber, Salinger, etc. And then I ploughed into the volume that I thought might have the article I was seeking.

I opened the cover, and began reading the Talk of the Town, the section where I was certain the little piece was located. I started reading and kept reading, page after page that I know I had read before but seemed as timely and as fresh as they first did at first reading. I didn’t find the article. It didn’t matter for I was overtaken by the pleasure of reading once again those few pages in but a single issue in one bound volume on the shelf along with countless other bound volumes of the magazine. I wonder what will become of all those priceless volumes in the new bookless library?

Summer Break

I’ve been blogging for Marks In The Margin for over a year now and it’s time to take a summer break. Thanks for reading and for responding. You can still send me ideas or comments at rkatzev@teleport.com. I would enjoy hearing from you.

Weekend Links

What Happened?
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2007/11/26/071126sh_shouts_ephron

Book Chat
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106150832&ft=1&f=1008

Racy Novel for Students
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/teachers-racy-novel-to-encourage-pupils-to-read-1735250.html

Stages of E-Mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/opinion/01ephron.html?_r=1

Remaking Civilization
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/28/search-civilization-john-armstrong-review

50 Best Summer Reads
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/05/summer-reading-books-recommendations

Truth in Fiction

Fiction is better at “the truth” than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don’t begin to understand. Doris Lessing

I would be less inclined to read fiction were it not for the truths I find there. These are truths that, as others have said, one rarely finds elsewhere. (Fiction, at least some fiction, can also confront us with truths we might otherwise never have encountered--Elliot Perlman). In trying to unravel Lessing’s puzzlement about the nature of literary truths, I have looked more closely at those truths I found in my Commonplace Book. These truths are for the most part propositions that fall into one of four general categories:

Conceptual Truth: A passage that reinforces a belief, value or moral conviction that I hold, often one that is not widely held and so its literary expression makes it especially noteworthy or is one that I have not thought about but calls for consideration.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday contains a great many passages of this kind. Throughout, McEwan speculates about the origins of human behavior and difficulties of identifying them with any precision. Here is one:

It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in the two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination.

Personal Truth: A passage that reveals something about myself (or one that I had not recognized before), as well as a correspondence between some aspect of my life and a character in a story, most likely one that I identify with in some respect. Colm Toibin writes in The Master.

Everyone he knew carried with them the aura of another life which was half-secret and half-open, to be known about but not mentioned.….He remembered the shock when he first came to know Paris, the culture of easy duplicity, the sense he got of these men and women, watched over by the novelists, casually withholding what mattered to them most.

Hypothetical Truth: The passages in this group pose a question or put forward a hypothesis that seems original or usual in some respect, one that warrants inquiry or confirms a finding that I have read about before. In The Black Violin Maxence Fermine writes,

There is nothing worse than having been truly happy once in your life. From that moment on, everything makes you sad, even the most insignificant things.

Aesthetic Truth: A passage that has captured my attention or moved me deeply or is so well written that it has a certain quality that one can only call beautiful. Its truth consists in being true to real life or, as Seilmann & Larsen have pointed out, has the character of verisimilitude—the semblance of real life. Here is an example by Andre Aciman from Pensione Eolo,

That winter, when it was all over, I would walk or ride a bus past her building. Sometimes I’d think how lucky I’d been to have spent a year with her there and how gladly I would give everything I now had to be back with the same woman, staring out those windows whenever she went sulking into the other room, imagining and envying those strolling outside, never once suspecting that one day soon I might be a stroller, too, looking in envying the man I’d been there once, knowing all along, though that if I had to do it over again, I’d still end where I was, yearning for those days when I was living with a woman I had never loved and would never love but in whose home I had…invented a woman who, like me was neither here nor there.

The truths that I find in these passages, as in most of those in my Commonplace Book, may be uniquely true for me. That is the wonderful thing about literature: it makes no claims of universality, it does not intend to be not true or false in the way an empirical proposition is.

Rather we read ourselves into literature without concern, as we are in science, for whether or not the passage is true for others, and if so, for how many and to what degree. Instead, the truth of any given passage is immediately true for the reader because it corresponds to his or her experience or provides a language for it in a way that had not been available before. “Yes,” we say, “that is true for me. This is my story. That’s exactly the way I felt. Or I had not realized its truth until I saw it on the page.”

Fiction Therapy

Reading great works of literature is not often considered among the foremost sources of personal change. Yet many individuals say it was a book that changed the course of their life. Others put it more generally as Patrick Kurp has. “I’ve read thousands of books since I learned to read 50 years ago and that, certainly, has had a cumulative impact on my life – all that time I could have spent bowling or watching the History Channel …Books have helped populate my interior landscape, overhauled my imagination, buffered me against loneliness and despair, kept me amused, honed my critical faculties…”

Reports like this suggests that both practitioners and investigators of the behavior change process may be neglecting the very considerable influence that works of literature can have for individuals. To be sure, some attempts have been made to examine their clinical implications. One approach, with highly variable results, is known as bibliotherapy--the use of reading material (usually self-help manuals), whether imaginative or informational...to effect changes in alcoholism, obesity, and mild depression, etc.

The application of poetry, also with variable effects, has been employed in clinical situations. Reading a poem to an individual or group and then discussing its personal meaning is the most widely used poetry therapy technique. In addition, individuals are sometimes asked to write a poem on a subject the therapist believes would allow the patient to express more freely the issues to be resolved.

A few years ago, I chanced upon a Web site with a provocative hypothesis by Edward Santoro, a teacher of literature, who wrote, “Many years ago I was thinking seriously about a radical psychology (though I wasn’t calling it that) that would include fiction as therapy, quite similar to prescribing Prozac or Ritalin or whatever is the flavor of the day. If somebody is trying to work through a difficult issue, particular works of fiction could be prescribed, discussed, analyzed. This dialogue and the learning to think critically about a text would put a person into a better position of knowing the self and society and their interrelation. I thought and still do think this would be a successful therapy. The irony is that this is exactly what education is supposed to do. Years ago I was looking for books on just such a topic, and though there were a few, nothing really described what I had in mind."

Joseph Gold in Read for Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System illustrates precisely what Santoro was seeking. According to Gold, the literature can be therapeutic because in reading literary fiction or poetry “…you experience feelings, emotions, as well as thoughts and images. You see pictures in your mind and you have feelings associated with the pictures. …When you learn to do this, you can use your feelings about what you read to explore yourself, your relations, your attitudes to job, home, sex, children and parents, aging, death and religion, for example. There is a direct link between what you feel about stories and what you feel about everything else, especially about yourself.”

In one case study, Gold describes a woman who had been suffering from an extremely poor self-image that he attributed to a childhood characterized by a rejecting mother. Eventually Gold asked her to Daddy’s Girl by Charlotte Vale Allen, a novel that depicts a young girl growing up under somewhat similar conditions. Gold reports that for the first time the woman “felt some real energy and excitement at seeing her feelings described in print.” In turn, this led the woman to begin to redefine her early experience and move on to a more fulfilling life.

In another case study, Gold describes a student who came from a profoundly troubled home. After assigning her Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the student wrote to Gold: “What I admire about Connie Chatterley is her courage to be free, to do what she wants and to live her own life.” Sometime after Gold learned that this student had indeed taken charge of her own life by entering the Canadian Armed Forces flight-training program.

In Read For Your Life Gold recounts numerous applications of literary therapy in his practice, applications that he believes were directly associated with subsequent improvement in his clients. These apparent successes are largely due to Gold’s very considerable knowledge of literary fiction. Tailoring the reading material to the client’s emotional or cognitive needs is one of the critical requirements for a successful application of bibliotherapy. To be an effective as a bibliotherapist, a practitioner has to be well versed in both literature and clinical technique, a combination that is not often found among professionals in either discipline. It remains to be seen whether further applications of this approach will lead to the establishment of training programs to develop just such expertise.

Becoming Less & Less

Life made more sense in the Middle Ages, when no one lasted past forty.
Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening

Philip Roth’s Exist Ghost, like his other recent books (The Dying Animal and Everyman) is a meditation on aging. In Exit Ghost, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York from his solitary home on a mountain in New England, sans television, sans computer, sans telephone, although he does have a typewriter.

“I’d conquered the solitary’s way of life; I knew its tests and satisfactions and over time had shaped the scope of my needs to its limitations, long ago abandoning excitement, intimacy, adventure, and antagonisms in favor of quiet, steady, predictable contact with nature and reading and my work.”

In New York he confronts old age squarely in the person of Amy Bellette, the former mistress of his beloved mentor, also a cloistered writer, and Jamie, the young and beautiful writer, who along with her husband, will swap their West Side apartment for his isolated retreat for a year.

The once beautiful and charming Amy is now an old woman, an invalid who is recovering from brain surgery. Jamie’s allure draws him back to everything he thought he had left behind, an intimacy of the mind and body. “…a man who’d cut himself off from sustained human contact and its possibilities yielding to the illusion of starting again.” To paraphrase Roth, there is the desire still and the temptation aroused and the reality is agony.

Yet Zuckerman is 71 years old now and has recently had prostate surgery, leaving him both impotent and incontinent. “To possess control over one’s bladder—who among the whole and healthy ever considers the freedom that bestows or the anxious vulnerability its loss can impose on even the most confident among us.” Again, to paraphrase Roth, there is no virility, only the arousal and the anticipation.

Earlier in Everyman Roth had written that “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” No once has characterized aging more accurately; no one has described it so cogently.

In a longer passage from Everyman, Roth ruminates further about the experience of growing old, “He neither possessed the productive man’s male allure nor was capable of germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he could resume where he’d left off only a few years before. But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was—the aimless days and uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out.”

Much of what Roth says is consistent with current medical research on aging. Atul Gawande summarizes this work in an article he wrote for the New Yorker in 2007. Gawande says, “The idea that living things shut down and not just wear down has received substantial support in the past decade.” Gawande continues, “…one too many joints are damaged, one too many arties calcify. There are no more backups. We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore. We just fall apart.” Echoing Morton in the passage at the start of this post, Gawande says that human beings are in a way like freaks who are living well beyond their appointed time.

Roth is now 75 and has been through some rough times recently. I am getting close and am not as fit as I once was either. So his tales of growing old, while depressing and grim, do confirm much of what I am either experiencing or surely about to experience. How bleak the prospect, how sad the inevitable.

Nor surprisingly, aging was one of the most frequent themes in the study that I undertook a few years ago of my Commonplace Book. Below are a few of the passages I collected in the books I had been reading up until the time of my review.

From now on, little by little, you must prepare yourself to face death. If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to dwell. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, things of equal value.
Haruki Murakami

For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future.
J. M. Coetzee Disgrace

As he eased himself out of bed he reflected that survival was a mixed blessing. It involved surrendering that once young self to time, and time taught harsh lessons.
Anita Brookner Making Things Better

…he didn’t mind death so much as dying.
Joseph Epstein Fabulous Small Jews

She’s probably no older than me. In fact, she’s my future—the wart, the walker, the wheelchair. As she came closer, he heard her mumbling.
Irving Yalom The Schopenhauer Cure